Heat advisories and excessive heat warnings cover most of Texas Friday from Texarkana to the Rio Grande. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas launched a "Contingency Reserve Service" earlier this week to monitor conditions and availability of power.
Friday afternoon, the Contingency Reserve Service showed 3,750 MW of capacity that could come online within 30 minutes and 2,500 MW of capacity that could be available within ten minutes.
"We want to incentivize people to build. I'm very concerned about the grid, and until we build more natural gas plants, we are going to be thin, so we have to do that," says Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
This year, the Texas Senate passed a bill that would include incentives for the construction of natural gas power plants. SB6 did not advance out of committee in the House.
Patrick says the legislature did come together on a "good first step." Lawmakers passed incentives that include a 3% loan to build a natural gas plant, a 10% completion bonus and a ten year property tax abatement. Companies that intend to build must sign up by the end of this year.
"I also told the governor, if no one takes us up on these offers by the end of this year, we need to build the reserve," Patrick says. "We just need more power."
Former State Representative Jason Isaac, who now works for the conservative think tank, Texas Public Policy Foundation, says renewable sources now make up 40% of the state's energy production, but they are heavily subsidized by the federal government and less reliable than coal and natural gas.
He says the UK and Germany are now shifting back toward coal and natural gas because they recognize the importance of reliable energy for economic growth.
The German state, North Rhine-Westphalia, is taking down wind turbines set up in 2001 to allow greater access to a coal mine.
"They're taking down wind turbines and wind farms to get to the coal underneath because that's a reliable electric generation source," Isaac says. "The threat to not having reliable electricity is deindustrialization. That's what countries like Germany and the United Kingdom have experienced."
Isaac says the 2021 Texas legislature took action to start making the grid more reliable. Among items is a requirement that ERCOT order power plants to defer maintenance during periods of high demand.
"You don't have a lot of stuff down for maintenance right now because of some of the improvements the Electric Reliability Council of Texas was legislatively told to do in 2021," he says.
Isaac sat on the House Energy Resources and Environmental Regulation Committees. He says the federal government is "heavily distorting" the market by providing incentives for wind and solar over thermal production.
"I think this last legislative session, we've put another notch in the belt of favoring reliable, affordable electric generation," he says.
Isaac has testified before Congress, saying the U.S. has excelled because of reliable energy production and has led in research to make that production cleaner and safer.
"Of all the technology the Chinese steal from us, it'd be nice if they would utilize our pollution control technology, but they don't," he says. "That's why we're world leaders in environmental protection, number one in access to clean and safe drinking water, something a billion people in China would love to be able to claim, but they can't because they don't care about the pollution. We actually care about the pollution in this country."
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